Anthropologists' interest in religion began to emerge during the colonial period by Europeans. This was triggered by their success in discovering a "new world," namely a world that was very different from theirs in Europe. At that time the European world was known to be so secular and did not want to know religion. Whereas in the eastern world, they actually found something completely new for them, namely the emergence of various cultural phenomena that were so closely related to the religion that thrived in it.
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Hafid Ismail (2022) studied this question.